Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Booker–McConnell Prize and commonly known simply as the Booker Prize) is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade.[1] From its inception, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014 it was widened to any English-language novel—a change which proved controversial.[2][3]

A high-profile literary award in British culture, the Booker Prize is greeted with anticipation and fanfare.[4] It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be selected for inclusion in the shortlist or even to be nominated for the "longlist".

Man Booker Prize

Awarded for

Best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK

History and administration

The prize was originally known as the Booker–McConnell Prize, after the company Booker, McConnell Ltd began sponsoring the event in 1969;[5] it became commonly known as the "Booker Prize" or simply "the Booker".

When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain "Booker" as part of the official title of the prize. The foundation is an independent registered charity funded by the entire profits of Booker Prize Trading Ltd, of which it is the sole shareholder.[6] The prize money awarded with the Booker Prize was originally £21,000, and was subsequently raised to £50,000 in 2002 under the sponsorship of the Man Group, making it one of the world's richest literary prizes.

In 1970, Bernice Rubens became the first woman to win the Booker Prize, for The Elected Member.[7] The rules of the Booker changed in 1971; previously, it had been awarded retrospectively to books published prior to the year in which the award was given. In 1971 the year of eligibility was changed to the same as the year of the award; in effect, this meant that books published in 1970 were not considered for the Booker in either year. The Booker Prize Foundation announced in January 2010 the creation of a special award called the "Lost Man Booker Prize," with the winner chosen from a longlist of 22 novels published in 1970.[8]

There is a well-established London literary community. Rushdie doesn't get shortlisted now because he has attacked that community. That is not a good game plan if you want to win the Booker. Norman Mailer has found the same thing in the US – you have to "be a citizen" if you want to win prizes. The real scandal is that [Martin] Amis has never won the prize. In fact, he has only been shortlisted once and that was for Time's Arrow, which was not one of his strongest books. That really is suspicious. He pissed people off with Dead Babies and that gets lodged in the culture. There is also the feeling that he has always looked towards America.[10]

In 1972, the winning writer John Berger, known for his Marxist worldview, protested during his acceptance speech against Booker McConnell. He blamed Booker's 130 years of sugar production in the Caribbean for the region's modern poverty.[11][12] Berger donated half of his £5,000 prize to the British Black Panther movement, because they had a socialist and revolutionary perspective in agreement with his own.[5][11][13]

In 1980, Anthony Burgess, writer of Earthly Powers, refused to attend the ceremony unless it was confirmed to him in advance whether he had won.[5] His was one of two books considered likely to win, the other being Rites of Passage by William Golding. The judges decided only 30 minutes before the ceremony, giving the prize to Golding. Both novels had been seen as favourites to win leading up to the prize, and the dramatic "literary battle" between two senior writers made front page news.[5][14]

In 1981, nominee John Banville wrote a letter to The Guardian requesting that the prize be given to him so that he could use the money to buy every copy of the longlisted books in Ireland and donate them to libraries, "thus ensuring that the books not only are bought but also read — surely a unique occurrence."[5][15]

In 1993, two of the judges threatened to walk out when Trainspotting appeared on the longlist; Irvine Welsh's novel was pulled from the shortlist to satisfy them. The novel would later receive critical acclaim, and is now considered Welsh's masterpiece.[16]

The choice of James Kelman's book How Late It Was, How Late as 1994 Booker Prize winner proved to be one of the most controversial in the award's history.[17]RabbiJulia Neuberger, one of the judges, declared it "a disgrace" and left the event, later deeming the book to be "crap"; WHSmith's marketing manager called the award "an embarrassment to the whole book trade"; Waterstone's in Glasgow sold a mere 13 copies Kelman's "Mogadon" the following week.[18] In 1994, Guardian literary editor Richard Gott, citing the lack of objective criteria and the exclusion of American authors, described the prize as "a significant and dangerous iceberg in the sea of British culture that serves as a symbol of its current malaise."[5][19]

In 1997, the decision to award Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things proved controversial. Carmen Callil, chair of the previous year's Booker judges, called it an "execrable" book and said on television that it shouldn't even have been on the shortlist. Booker Prize chairman Martyn Goff said Roy won because nobody objected, following the rejection by the judges of Bernard MacLaverty's shortlisted book due to their dismissal of him as "a wonderful short-story writer and that Grace Notes was three short stories strung together."[20]

Before 2001, each year's longlist of nominees was not publicly revealed.[21]

In 2001, A. L. Kennedy, who was a judge in 1996, called the prize "a pile of crooked nonsense" with the winner determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is".[10]

The Booker Prize created a permanent home for the archives from 1968 to present at Oxford Brookes University Library. The Archive, which encompasses the administrative history of the Prize from 1968 to date, collects together a diverse range of material, including correspondence, publicity material, copies of both the Longlists and the Shortlists, minutes of meetings, photographs and material relating to the awards dinner (letters of invitation, guest lists, seating plans). Embargoes of ten or twenty years apply to certain categories of material; examples include all material relating to the judging process and the Longlist prior to 2002.[22]

Between 2005 and 2008, the Booker Prize alternated between writers from Ireland and India. "Outsider" John Banville began this trend in 2005 when his novel The Sea was selected as a surprise winner:[23] Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent, famously condemned it as "possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award" and rival novelist Tibor Fischer poured scorn on Banville's victory.[24]Kiran Desai of India won in 2006. Anne Enright's 2007 victory came about due to a jury badly split over Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach. The following year it was India's turn again, with Aravind Adiga narrowly defeating Enright's fellow Irishman Sebastian Barry.[25]

Historically, the winner of the Man Booker Prize had been required to be a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, or Zimbabwe. It was announced on 18 September 2013 that future Man Booker Prize awards would consider authors from anywhere in the world, so long as their work was in English and published in the UK.[26] This change proved controversial in literary circles. Former winner A. S. Byatt and former judge John Mullan said the prize risked diluting its identity, whereas former judge A. L. Kennedy welcomed the change.[3][27] Following this expansion, the first winner not from the Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe was American Paul Beatty in 2016. Another American, George Saunders, won the following year.[28] In 2018, publishers sought to reverse the change, arguing that the inclusion of American writers would lead to homogenisation, reducing diversity and opportunities everywhere, including in America, to learn about "great books that haven't already been widely heralded."[29]

Man Group announced in early 2019 that the year's prize will be the last of 18 under their sponsorship, and it was reported that the Booker Prize Foundation were in talks with a new sponsor for 2020.[30]

Judging

The selection process for the winner of the prize commences with the formation of an advisory committee, which includes a writer, two publishers, a literary agent, a bookseller, a librarian, and a chairperson appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation. The advisory committee then selects the judging panel, the membership of which changes each year, although on rare occasions a judge may be selected a second time. Judges are selected from amongst leading literary critics, writers, academics and leading public figures.

The Booker judging process and the very concept of a "best book" being chosen by a small number of literary insiders is controversial for many. The Guardian introduced the "Not the Booker Prize" voted for by readers partly as a reaction to this.[31]
Author Amit Chaudhuri wrote "The idea that a “book of the year” can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer".[32]

The winner is usually announced at a ceremony in London's Guildhall, usually in early October.

^ In 1971, the nature of the Prize was changed so that it was awarded to novels published in that year instead of in the previous year; therefore, no novel published in 1970 could win the Booker Prize. This was rectified in 2010 by the awarding of the "Lost Man Booker Prize" to J. G. Farrell's Troubles.[63]

Special awards

In 1993, to mark the prize's 25th anniversary, a "Booker of Bookers" Prize was given. Three previous judges of the award, Malcolm Bradbury, David Holloway and W. L. Webb, met and chose Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the 1981 winner, as "the best novel out of all the winners."[64]

Similarly, The Best of the Booker was awarded in 2008 to celebrate the prize's 40th anniversary. A shortlist of six winners was chosen and the decision was left to a public vote; the winner was again Midnight's Children.[65][66]

Facts and statistics

Each publisher's imprint may submit two titles. In addition, previous winners of the prize and those who have been shortlisted in the previous five years are automatically considered. Books may also be called in: publishers can make written representations to the judges to consider titles in addition to those already entered. In the 21st century the average number of books considered by the judges has been approximately 130.

Related awards

A separate prize for which any living writer in the world may qualify, the Man Booker International Prize was inaugurated in 2005. Until 2015, it was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. In 2016, the award was significantly reconfigured, and is now given annually to a single book in English translation, with a £50,000 prize for the winning title, shared equally between author and translator.

A Russian version of the Booker Prize was created in 1992 called the Booker-Open Russia Literary Prize, also known as the Russian Booker Prize. In 2007, Man Group plc established the Man Asian Literary Prize, an annual literary award given to the best novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and published in the previous calendar year.

^Hoover, Bob (10 February 2008). "'Gathering' storm clears for prize winner Enright". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved 10 February 2008. In America, literary prizes are greeted with the same enthusiasm as a low Steelers draft choice. Not so in the British Isles, where the $98,000 Man Booker Fiction Prize can even push Amy Winehouse off the front page – at least for a day. The atmosphere around the award approaches sports-championship proportions, with London bookies posting the ever-changing odds on the nominees. Then, in October when the winner is announced live on the BBC TV evening news, somebody always gets ticked off.

The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.

The 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction was awarded at a ceremony on 14 October 2014. Until 2014, only novels written in English and from authors in the Commonwealth, including the UK, the Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible for consideration; however from 2014 rules were changed to extend eligibility to any novel written in English. It is therefore the first time in the award's history that authors from the United States of America have been included.

The 2018 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded at a ceremony on 16 October 2018. The Man Booker dozen of 13 books was announced on the 24th of July, and was narrowed down to a shortlist of six on the 20th of September. The longlist included Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, the first in Booker Prize history to nominate a graphic novel.

Anna Burns was awarded the 2018 Booker Prize for her third novel, Milkman, receiving £50,000; she became the first Northern Irish author to win the prize.

Anne Teresa Enright FRSL (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She has published novels, short stories, essays, and one non-fiction book. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year.

Before winning the Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern zeitgeist.

David Malcolm Storey (13 July 1933 – 27 March 2017) was an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a professional rugby league footballer. He won the Booker Prize in 1976 for his novel Saville. He also won the MacMillan Fiction Award for This Sporting Life in 1960.

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, ( man-TEL; née Thompson; born 6 July 1952) is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of the Cromwell trilogy.

Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell (who posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third instalment to the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is in progress.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) (Arabic: الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية‎) is a literary prize managed in association with the Booker Prize Foundation in London, and supported by the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi. The prize is specifically for prose fiction by Arabic authors, along the lines of the Man Booker Prize. Each year, the winner of the prize receives US$50,000 and the six shortlisted authors receive US$10,000 each.

The aim of the award is to recognise and reward excellence in contemporary Arabic fiction writing and to encourage wider readership of good-quality Arabic literature in the region and internationally. The prize is also designed to encourage the translation and promotion of Arabic language literature into other major world languages. An independent board of trustees, drawn from across the Arab world and beyond, is responsible for appointing six new judges each year, and for the overall management of the prize.

William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."Banville has received numerous awards in his career. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, while 2013 brought both the Irish PEN Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Banville's stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. He was made a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia in 2017.

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.

In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

The following is a list of winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Winning titles are listed in yellow, first in their year.

The prize has been awarded each year since 1969 to the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland. In 2014, it was opened for the first time to any work published in the United Kingdom and in the English language.

There have been three special awards celebrating the Booker's history. In 1993, the "Booker of Bookers" prize was awarded to Salman Rushdie for Midnight's Children (the 1981 winner) as the best novel to win the award in its first 25 years. Midnight's Children also won a public vote in 2008, on the prize's fortieth anniversary, "The Best of the Booker". In 2018 a special "Golden Booker" was awarded celebrating 50 years of the award - this award was won by Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient.

The Lost Man Booker Prize was a special edition of the Man Booker Prize awarded by a public vote in 2010 to a novel from 1970 as the books published in 1970 were not eligible for the Man Booker Prize due to a rules alteration; until 1970 the prize was awarded to books published in the previous year, while from 1971 onwards it was awarded to books published the same year as the award. The prize was won by J. G. Farrell for Troubles.

Literary agent and archivist Peter Straus has been credited with conceiving the idea of a Man Booker Prize for the missing year after wondering why Robertson Davies's 1970 novel Fifth Business had not been included in the Man Booker Prize shortlist. A longlist of 22 titles was drawn up by organisers. A shortlist of six was selected by Rachel Cooke, Katie Derham and Tobias Hill, and revealed in London on 25 March 2010 when voting commenced on the Man Booker Prize website. Voting closed on 23 April 2010. The winner was announced on 19 May 2010.Four of the shortlisted authors were dead, with only Nina Bawden and Shirley Hazzard alive to give their reactions to being included. Bawden called it "astonishing actually ... I thought I knew all my books backwards but I couldn't remember what this one was about". Hazzard regretted that her husband, Francis Steegmuller, was no longer alive to witness the occasion. J. G. Farrell won the 1973 Man Booker Prize for The Siege of Krishnapur. Bawden and Muriel Spark were previously shortlisted. Tobias Hill said Patrick White, noted for requesting that his name be struck off the 1979 Man Booker prize shortlist and known for his general disapproval of receiving awards, would be "spinning in his grave" if he had won the Lost Man Booker Prize for The Vivisector. However, White's literary executor, Barbara Mobbs, said he had left behind "no written evidence" that he would disapprove of a posthumous award and that she was "not going to run around saying take him out".

The Man Booker International Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title. The judges for the year compiled their own lists of authors, and submissions were not invited.Since 2016, the award has been given annually to a single book in English translation, with a £50,000 prize for the winning title, shared equally between author and translator.

Marlon James (born 24 November 1970) is a Jamaican writer. He has published four novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019). Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. James is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing.

Philip Michael Ondaatje, (; born 12 September 1943), is a Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors.Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing The Dainty Monsters, and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. However, he is more recently recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel The English Patient (1992), which was adapted into a film in 1996. In 2018, Ondaatje won the Golden Man Booker Prize for The English Patient.In addition to his literary writing, Ondaatje has been an important force in "fostering new Canadian writing" with two decades commitment to Coach House Press (around 1970-90), and his editorial credits on Canadian literary projects like the journal Brick, and the Long Poem Anthology (1979), among others.

Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by British Indian author Salman Rushdie. It deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature.

The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.

Midnight's Children won both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. It was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary.In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels". It was also added to the list of Great Books of the 20th Century, published by Penguin Books.

The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of World War II. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man — the eponymous patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper, and a Canadian thief. The story occurs during the North African Campaign and centres on the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters. The book won the 1992 Booker Prize, the 2018 Golden Man Booker, and the Governor General's Award.

The Luminaries is the second novel by Eleanor Catton. It was published by Victoria University Press in August 2013, and by Granta Books on September 5, 2013. On October 15, it was announced as the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It is the longest book (at 832 pages), and Catton is the youngest author (at age 28), ever to have won the award.

Sir William Gerald Golding, (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.

Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Brasenose College, Oxford offers a non-stipendiary William Golding Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

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